water-tight roof, except when it rains. Meantime busy hands have
gathered boughs of the spruce and the feathery balsam, and shingled
the ground underneath the shanty for a bed. It is an aromatic bed:
in theory it is elastic and consoling. Upon it are spread the
blankets. The sleepers, of all sexes and ages, are to lie there in a
row, their feet to the fire, and their heads under the edge of the
sloping roof. Nothing could be better contrived. The fire is in
front: it is not a fire, but a conflagration--a vast heap of green
logs set on fire--of pitch, and split dead-wood, and crackling
balsams, raging and roaring. By the time, twilight falls, the cook
has prepared supper. Everything has been cooked in a tin pail and a
skillet,--potatoes, tea, pork, mutton, slapjacks. You wonder how
everything could have been prepared in so few utensils. When you
eat, the wonder ceases: everything might have been cooked in one
pail. It is a noble meal; and nobly is it disposed of by these
amateur savages, sitting about upon logs and roots of trees. Never
were there such potatoes, never beans that seemed to have more of the
bean in them, never such curly pork, never trout with more
Indian-meal on them, never mutton more distinctly sheepy; and the tea,
drunk out of a tin cup, with a lump of maple-sugar dissolved in it,
--it is the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes
the drinker to anecdote and hilariousness. There is no deception
about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote. Everything, in
short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life. It is
idyllic. And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing
feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made
to last, and not go to pieces in a person's stomach like a trivial
bun: we might record on them, in cuneiform characters, our incipient
civilization; and future generations would doubtless turn them up as
Acadian bricks. Good, robust victuals are what the primitive man